Procedure

• Milgram conducted a 'ground-breaking' piece of research at Yale University to see whether 'ordinary' people would carry out horrific acts, just because a person in a lab coat is ordering them to do so.
• Aim- To investigate whether ordinary people would obey an unjust order from an authority figure and inflict pain and injure an innocent person.
• Method- Milgram's sample consisted of 40 male American participants recruited through a newspaper advert. The participants were all volunteers who were paid $4.50 to take part.
• They were all invited to a laboratory at the prestigious Yale University, where they met the the experimenter and another participant(who were both confederates.)
• They 'drew lots' to see who would be assigned to each role within the study but this was fixed so that the real participant was always assigned to the role of 'teacher' and was instructed by the experimenter to administer an electric shock of increasing strength to the 'learner', 'Mr Wallace', every time he made a mistake when recalling a list of word pairs.
• The 'learner' was strapped by the arms into a chair in the room next door and a shock was demonstrated to the teacher to make the 'shocks' appear real. The participant was required to test the leaner's ability to recall pairs of words. Each time the learner got an answer wrong the teacher was required to administer an electric shock of increasing voltage, starting at 15V and going up in intervals of 15 to 450V.
• At 300V(intense shock), the learner would bang on the wall and complain.
• After 315V shock was administered there were no further responses heard from the learner.
• The experiment continued until either the participant refused to continue, or the maximum level of 450V, labelled 'danger severe shock' was reached.
• If the teacher tried to stop the experiment, the experimenter would respond with a series of verbal prods, for example 'The experimenter requires that you continue.'